Freedom Writers Diversity

For this assignment I chose to watch Freedom Writers. This is a heartfelt movie about a teacher named Erin Gruwell who finds a way to unify her disadvantaged, racially divided students and to improve their grasp of academics, partly by having them keep journals about their violent, troubled lives. The main diversity issue in this movie is cultural, ethnic, and racial tensions. According to Storti (1999), “Culture is the shared assumptions, values, and beliefs of a group of people which result in characteristic behavior” (p. 5). In the United States, and other similar societies, smaller ‘subcultures’ co-exist alongside the large groups with which people identify themselves. There are, however, important differences. Subcultures …’exist within dominant cultures and are often based on economic or social class, ethnicity, race or
16). These factors are fundamental to the characters in the film. This movie showcases the reality of struggles some minority students face on a daily basis. It starts off with one of the main characters talking about the day that she was initiated into the gang, and how she was the third generation in her family to be a member. Because of some one’s ethnicity they were separated by gangs in the community and because of that there was conflict in the classroom. In the beginning racial and cultural differences was the main problem created in the movie, from the first day of class when the classroom split into their clichés to the violence that happened outside of the classroom. Racism is the act of believing that one race is superior to another. The teacher, Erin, superiors had doubts about